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Lonzo Ball might be in the luckiest man in the NBA right now, and it has nothing to do with what he can do on the basketball court. During Saturday night’s game between the Chicago Bulls and the Philadelphia 76ers, Joel Embiid found himself pretty upset about either a no-call against Nikola Vucevic or the fact that his handle got a little loose and the ball went out of bounds.

A frustrated Embiid let out a scream and threw a punch. It was not meant to do anything other than be a way to express his disappointment, but unbeknownst to him, Ball showed up and was directly in front of him. What happened next was Embiid accidentally throwing a punch that, if it landed, would have put Ball to sleep.

This was not meant to be Embiid’s best Tyson Fury impression, but it came about an inch away from being exactly that. Fortunately for Ball, that was not the case, and he was able to continue playing in a basketball game instead of getting knocked out. Embiid got hit with a technical foul, and he obviously was not happy about that, but at the very least, he can take some solace in knowing something extremely bad did not happen to someone on the other team.

It’s very rare that things are pretty with LSU and Alabama meet up on the football field, as the two SEC West programs always seem to play tough, hard-nosed football games against one another. But on Saturday night, we got a moment of beauty on a trick play involving a punter.

On their first possession of the game, the Tigers found themselves facing a fourth-and-4 from near midfield. They sent out the punt team, but instead of asking Avery Atkins to try and pin the Crimson Tide deep, the punter took the snap and started to barrel towards the line of scrimmage.

Now, asking a punter to run into a whole bunch of players on Alabama’s defense is an absolutely horrendous idea and a really great way to get your punter hurt. So instead of asking him to lower his shoulders and fight for yardage, Atkins pulled off a jump pass that no one on the Crimson Tide saw coming. Jack Mashburn snuck behind everyone and reeled in the pass, going 26 yards and setting LSU up in Bama territory.

The Tigers would go on to score a little bit later on the drive. Let this be a lesson to every college football coach: If your punter throws the ball, good things will happen.

Purdue football has done it again. Just weeks after they knocked off Iowa to end the Hawkeyes’ hopes of an undefeated season, the Boilermakers played hosts to Michigan State and dealt a major blow to the Spartans’ aspirations of making it to the College Football Playoff. By the time the dust settled in West Lafayette, Purdue picked up a decisive 40-29 win to move to 6-3 on the season.

While star wide receiver David Bell exploded — he caught 11 balls for 217 yards and a touchdown as he continues to make the case that he is among the best pass catchers in the sport — fellow receiver Jackson Anthrop housed one of the best trick plays that we’ve seen. Purdue took two plays, a double-reverse pass and a wide receiver screen, and mashed them together in a way that will make you raise your eyebrows.

Anthrop took a handoff from Aidan O’Connell and flipped it to another receiver, T.J. Sheffield. From there, Sheffield flipped it back to O’Connell, while Anthrop leaked out behind a whole lotta big fellas. He caught the ball and ran behind his offensive line, managed to make a few dudes miss, and had a 39-yard touchdown grab where he probably ran twice as far. It is certainly not a bad way to pick up your second score of the season,

It’s been years since Ye and producer Hit-Boy have worked together, and it’s all because the two had a falling out some years back. Hit-Boy previously spoke about the separation, saying it occurred after Ye found out he was working with Beyonce. During a recent interview on the Rory & Mal podcast, Hit-Boy further discussed the incident and how it almost affected his career. “I thugged through a lot of f*cked up sh*t, falling out with Kanye f*cked me up for a minute bro,” Hit-Boy said. “I was damn n****, am I still gonna be able to do this sh*t?”

He continued, “Just being a thousand, it’s n****s that done came to me that was like Ye said to this n****, ‘Don’t use Hit-Boy on your album.’ Like I really lived through that, n****. How many motherf*ckers could get through Kanye tryna derail their sh*t bro? So now you see why I’m at the Nas party like, “N**** I did a harder album than for Nas than you did, that’s just real.”

The Nas party that Hit-Boy is referring to is the album release celebration the two artists had for King’s Disease II, the Nas album that Hit-Boy executive produced. It was there that Hit-Boy said to the audience, “It’s not a hundred n****s producing the beat. It’s not a hundred n****s writing the rhymes, n****. It’s two n****s in the studio. I hear this shit right now, homie. It’s going down. King’s Disease II. Stream that sh*t, buy that sh*t.”

He added, “There don’t be n****s in the studio. It’s just me and bro. Do y’all hear this sh*t? It’s just me and this n**** in the studio. He’s barred up, I’m making beats. No hoopla. We not on f*ckin’ Twitter botherin’ y’all. We not on IG Live putting a weird-ass stream up, n****. We doin’ this sh*t for real though, n****! Stop playin’!”

Last month, Dave Chappelle stirred up some controversy with his Netflix special The Closer. Comments he made about the transgender community led to outrage, including from the streamer’s employees. Chappelle did get some support from the likes of 50 Cent and Caitlyn Jenner. 50 agreed with Chappelle about DaBaby’s homophobic comments, which Chappelle semi-defended, while Caitlyn Jenner said Chappelle’s words were “100% right.” Jay-Z also showed Chappelle some love during a recent conversation about the special on Twitter Spaces.

Jay spoke said “true art has to cause conversation.” He admitted that The Closer made him uncomfortable at multiple points but said, “Sometimes it’s going to be abrasive, sometimes it’s going to be off-putting to folks. But it opens up an opportunity to have a dialogue.” Jay later called Chappelle “super brave and super genius. If you spend time with him, he’s brilliant,” adding, “I think he pushed a lot of buttons.”

He continued. “These algorithms allow you to talk to people who agree with you,” he said, adding, “We have to speak to one another when we disagree… Anything that doesn’t have that tension, it’s not going to be real. We had fake conversations all this time before Trump was in office, then we got to see people for who they really were. And then we got to have real conversations.”

Jay also said, “I think great art is divisive. Some people like it, some people hate it. When you’re making great art, you have to be fearless and create something that you believe in. That’s what it’s about.”

Jay’s comments come after Chappelle, along with Barack Obama, inducted him into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.

Lil Durk is preparing to drop a new album, and his latest single suggests it could be a good one. The Chicago rapper released his new song “Lion Eyes” on Friday, which came with a new music video as well. It captures Durk in his home while he shows off his collection of watches, jewelry, and hundred-dollar bills. He also flaunts his video game skills. The track is the second that Durk’s released in recent weeks after “Pissed Me Off,” dropped last month.

The new song also arrives after Durk announced his next album. He posted an image of a whiteboard to his Instagram Story where he wrote, “7220 coming soon,” adding, “The voice [is] in album mode.” Durk also made sure to let his followers know that the upcoming project will be filled with “anthems and no skips.”

“Lion Eyes” also arrives after a view guest features from Durk. He and EST Gee recently joined Moneybagg Yo’s “Switches & Dracs” and connected with G Herbo and 21 Savage for a remix of Nardo Wick’s “Who Want Smoke??.”

Durk also expressed his desire to go back to school. “I’m going to get my high school diploma,” he wrote on Twitter. “I want to challenge myself on my goals and real life situations.”

You can watch the video for “Lion Eyes” above.

Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan had the kind of meteoric rise that most artists dream of back when her debut album, Lush came out in 2018. Now, she’s just released her sophomore effort, Valentine, and along with the record itself made her very first late night appearance. Performing the title track off the new album for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Jordan performed alongside hearts made of roses and a balloon backdrop while fronting her all-male backing band.

Uproxx critic Steven Hyden considers Valentine to be a big step forward for Jordan, and a lesson in boundary-setting too. “Fans of Lush responded to Jordan’s eagerness to expose herself in her music,” he wrote in his review of the record. Particularly as a young woman with an uncommon ability to articulate feelings most people her age struggle to fully grapple with. On Valentine, she’s just as honest and insightful, it’s just that the message is, “Step off, please.” The “reaction to indie fame” aspect of Valentine is only one part of the story. This is also Jordan’s “level up” record, the ambitious follow-up to the ingratiating but relatively simple Lush. On the first record, she focused almost solely on guitar, to the point of aligning herself with indie “shredders” like Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn. But on Valentine, she’s expanded her musical palate significantly, layering her songs with keyboards and strings in a manner consistent with “mature sophomore efforts” from young indie phenoms.”

Check out her late night performance up above.

It’s been almost a year since the 2020 election was called for Joe Biden, shattering his predecessor Donald J. Trump’s desire for a second term and putting him on what may be a collision course for legal hell, perhaps even jail. Or maybe nothing bad will happen to him. (So far only his supporters have been punished.) Maybe he’ll once again escape justice and nab that second term four years later than he had hoped. And if he does that, one of his former staffers warns, it will probably be even worse than you’d think.

As per Insider, Alyssa Farah, who served as both the director of strategic communications and assistant to Trump in 2020, went on CNN, where she joined a number of former associates, like Michael Cohen, in pointing out that the ex-president is a pretty bad dude. She reminded people that he’s a “man who has challenged our institutions near to the breaking point.”

She also echoed statements made by others in the know that a potential second Trump term would be “very different” from the already chaotic first. And she outlined what “scares” her the most about him doing another spin as the most powerful person in the world.

“There were things that he wanted to do when he was in power the first time that was well beyond the scope of what the US president should be able to do, but oftentimes it was simply the motivation of hoping to win reelection that kept him from doing things,” Farah said.

She only named a few things Trump would do if he returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Among them were “weaponizing the justice department against political opponents” and “going after the free press,” both of which he tried in his first term, though he could ramp both of those up. He would also, she said, “certainly be open to using the military for political reasons as well.”

Trump has yet to formally announce his candidacy for an election that’s still three years off, though some of his more die-hard-y supporters still believe he could magically replace Joe Biden. (Though each deadline for that has come and gone and Joe’s still there.) It might take convincing both GOP leaders and voters that more of President Trump isn’t good for anyone. But that didn’t exactly work out the last time, did it?

(Via Insider)

This story was originally published on HistoryBuff.

I’m pretty positive that Edgar Allan Poe had (has?) the power to travel through time. Hear me out on this one.

It’s not just the well-known circumstances of his life — orphaned at a young age, father of the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. Nor am I referring to the head-scratching details of the days leading up to his death: how he was found on the street near a voting poll wearing someone else’s clothes, and during his subsequent hospitalization, he was alleged to babble incoherently about an unidentified person named “Reynolds.”

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And I won’t even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe’s gravesite in the early hours of his birthday with a glass of cognac and three roses.

Tragic and curious, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the author’s creative output, which you’ll soon see is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible — nay, probable!

The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we go…

Exhibit A: “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket“

Photo by Albert Sterner/Wikimedia Commons.

Published in 1838, Poe’s only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.

Now here’s where it gets weird(er): In 1884, 46 years after the novel’s publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy’s name: Richard Parker.

The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the novel’s scene and the actual event. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence.” Striking indeed.

Exhibit B: “The Businessman“

Image from the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus/Wikimedia Commons/Wikimedia Commons.

In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury after taking an iron spike through the skull. Somehow he survived, though his personality would change drastically. These behavioral changes were closely studied, allowing the medical community to develop the first understanding of the role played by the frontal lobe on social cognition.

Except for Poe, who’d inexplicably understood the profound personality changes caused by frontal lobe syndrome nearly a decade earlier. In 1840, he penned a characteristically gruesome story called “The Businessman” about an unnamed narrator who suffers a traumatic head injury as a young boy, leading to a life of obsessive regularity and violent, sociopathic outbursts.

Poe’s grasp of frontal lobe syndrome is so precise that neurologist Eric Altshuler wrote, “There’s a dozen symptoms and he knows every single one… There’s everything in that story, we’ve hardly learned anything more.” Altshuler, who, to reiterate, is a medically-licensed neurologist and not at all a crackpot, went on to say, “It’s so exact that it’s just weird, it’s like he had a time machine.”

Exhibit C: “Eureka“

Photo via NASA/Wikimedia Commons.

Still unconvinced? What if I told you that Poe predicted the origins of the universe 80 years before modern science would begin to formulate the Big Bang theory? Surely, an amateur stargazer with no formal training in cosmology could not accurately describe the machinery of the universe, rejecting widely-held inaccuracies while solving a theoretical paradox that had bewildered astronomers since Kepler. Except that’s exactly what happened.

The prophetic vision came in the form of “Eureka,” a 150-page prose poem critically panned for its complexity and regarded by many as the work of a madman. Written in the final year of Poe’s life, “Eureka” describes an expanding universe that began in “one instantaneous flash” derived from a single “primordial particle.”

Poe goes on to put forth the first legitimate solution to Olbers’ paradox — the question of why, given the vast number of stars in the universe, the night sky is dark — by explaining that light from the expanding universe had not yet reached our solar system. When Edward Robert Harrison published “Darkness at Night” in 1987, he credited “Eureka” as having anticipated his findings.

In an interview with Nautilus, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe’s prescience, admitting, “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe.”

But what if Poe wasn’t of a day at all, but of all the days?

What if his written prophecies — on the cannibalistic demise of Richard Parker, the symptoms of frontal lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang theory — were merely reportage from his journey through the extratemporal continuum?

Photo from Dodd, Mead and Company/Wikimedia Commons.

Surely I sound like a tinfoil-capped loon, but maybe, maybe, there are many more prophecies scattered throughout the author’s work, a possibility made all the more likely by the fact that, as The New York Times notes, “Poe was so undervalued for so long, there is not a lot of Poe-related material around.”

I’ll leave you with this quote, taken from a letter that Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1844, in which he apologizes for his absence and slothfulness:

“I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass… You speak of “an estimate of my life” — and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things, to give any continuous effort to anything — to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing for solitude — a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.”

One of the best things about Cardi B as a public figure and pop star, is she doesn’t resign herself to the remove that so many celebrities adopt once they get famous. Instead, she still acts exactly like a normal person would when they meet someone famous or exciting, and her reactions when these meetings do happen are pretty priceless. She gave us another hilarious and pretty freaking adorable moment of celebrity fandom this week, when she met Robert Pattinson, aka Edward Cullen, for the first time. “Look who I met the other day ! I felt like a teen!” she wrote to caption the quick video.

At first she pretends to just be primping for a forward-facing video, before revealing her true purpose: “Come on, look at my friend guys,” she begins. But when Edward — sorry, I mean Robert — pops into the frame, all she can do is yell. Yes, it seems like Cardi was also a Twilight stan along with the rest of us. Hey, she’s the right age for it! For his part, Pattinson seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny, but he was a good sport which really just makes me like him more than I already did. Anyway, if you like watching Cardi the celeb, catch her hosting the AMAs in just a few days.